#NotOurNhaTrang

Today is our second full day in Nha Trang. The weather has been pretty uncooperative with our holiday plans thus far, and this morning, it was not looking like that was going to change.

The plan in coming to Nha Trang, was to have a bit of a beach break for ourselves, about half way through our journey home. The beach is still here, though I think typhoon season has done a pretty good job of trying to wash it away, and replace it with the unwanted detritus disgorged by Vietnam's rivers. The city is working to clear the beach, but the volume of rubbish to remove is huge, and it's all done by hand. They will still be clearing the beach next month I think.

With the inability to head to the beach, we decided to head out to a nearby pagoda, after dropping our clothes at a local laundry place to be cleaned and dried. For the tidy sum of 6GBP, we were able to get 11kgs of dirty washing cleaned, dried, and folded. If only these services existed in the normal world. When we had the same service done in Beijing, it cost about 10 times as much per kg.

Thanks to the rain that has been falling persistently, the roads outside our hotel resembled muddy rivers, more so than roads. This made for an uncomfortable walk, as at times the water was close to knee height. There was also the issue of what was in the water. At the very least all the petro-chemicals washed off the road, at the worst, goodness knows.

Making it through the torrents of water, dodging the bow-wakes of buses and trucks, we made it to better drained streets, and casually made our way to the pagoda, via a coffee pitstop at a local cafe, and at the train station to buy our tickets from Nha Trang to Saigon. A top tip for the budget traveller: if you want keep costs down. Don't book anything online, or over the phone, or through your hotel. The cheapest way is to present yourself in person. By the time that someone has put their commission on the actual cost, you can easily be paying 50% more than the actual cost of travel.

On the way back to the hotel, through the hot, humid, and chaotic world of Nha Trang, we stopped at an Indian restaurant for a quick snack. Given the vast number of Russias in Nha Trang, trying to find food that wasn't super westernised Vietnamese, or just plain western, was quite hard. So chicken tandoori it was.

Getting back to the hotel, we wanted to relax a bit, and did so with another shower, and for Courtney, a foot massage before dinner. Sadly, you get what you pay for, and the foot massage that Courtney got was not the greatest. It was a bad sign, when a 12 year old was the one that rocked up to do the massage, and it didn't improve. After an hour of rubbing of legs (not feet) and disappointment, it was over.

Then it was on to one of the few Vietnamese restaurants in town that wasn't too western. The meal was half decent, but definitiely a bit too western for our tastes. We can't wait to get out of Nha Trang. It just isn't for us.Baca lagi